With or Without Common Core The State Owns Public School Kids

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The battle over “Common Core” continues to rage in that simmering cauldron of legal buffoonery called the Louisiana Legislature. There are now six bills pending that either cement Common Core into the legal fabric of the state’s education “system” or remove the educational scourge entirely. One St. Tammany man who testified at a House hearing said exactly what needed to be said. “You will not take our control of our children and surrender it to the federal government, because they are not your children.” But that’s a statement totally out of sync with the existence of a “public school” system to start with. If parents really want “their” children’s education to be controlled by them there are but two alternatives. Choose a private school and even then the State has its ill-educated hands inside the standards cookie jar, or choose to home-school.

In other words, the Common Core opponents cannot have their “hands off federal government” cake and eat it too. The heavy hand of Mordor’s latest dark wizard of education, Arne Duncan, is all over Louisiana “public schools.” From standardized testing, to the content of school lunches the Federals are everywhere. Federal funding of Louisiana public schools totaled $1.2 Billion in 2012, that’s an awful lot of “control” the Common Core opponents seem to care nothing about.

Folks, here’s the truth: the only way out of this command and control model is to abolish “public education” altogether which seems like a radical proposition but it shouldn’t. Ask yourself how education was administered before the “public” model was adopted and the answer you’ll receive was “parents and priests”. For example most people don’t know that LSU was started as a seminary that included militia training and the Jesuits were educating WhoDats way back in 1849.

I am all for expelling Common Core from this state forever but let’s be honest about who owns the kids we send to public schools without or without Common Core.